The TV shows you need to watch this week: From Famalam to Game of Thrones
Famalam is a brilliant sketch series that is currently tucked away on BBC3 and the BBC iPlayer, which is a polite way of saying that the BBC is really not giving it the profile it deserves. I don’t honestly know what they’re playing at on this one.
Anyway, like previous sleeper hits such as People Just Do Nothing and This Country, Famalam will, I believe, become as big a mass-audience, award-winning success as its (now) better-known peers.
It’s very funny, that’s why. If you think of it as the breakthrough Black British version of Goodness Gracious Me, which did so much for British Asian comedy some years ago, then you’ve got it about right. It certainly falls under what I call the Jewish Comedian rule – that the most vicious ethnic satire can best be dished out by those who spring from that very community itself, both because they can be counted on to avoid hate, and because they understand the subtleties and the absurdities rather better than others.
Famalam is in its much-deserved second series now, and all 10 episodes are available to binge on iPlayer – and I have been enjoying them. Nigerian aunties; wastemen; Ghanaian mothers; gangsta rappers; rubbish rapper Scribbler P; a black detective who stars in “The Midsomer Motherf***er Murders”; and in the “The Midsomer Motherf***er XXX Files”; Senegalese footballers; the KKK; Black Jesus; Grime; Black Lives Matter and, a word I can hardly bring myself to type, “Incognegro”, another spoof TV show in which “a white guy’s mind is put into the body of a black guy”. Like I say, vicious satire, just the way you like it.
Famalam, then: you’ll thank me for it (and the variously superb Samson Kayo, Vivienne Acheampong, John MacMillan, Roxy Sternberg, Tom Moutchi and Gbemisola Ikumelo. Plus the BBC).
For the many, not the few... There’s little doubt about what is the standout popular event of the week – the return of Game of Thrones for its final run. I hope. Now you may, like me, regard the whole shebang as a load of runic sub-Tolkien semi-pornographic amulet-wearing nonsense that has no artistic or even entertainment value whatsoever, and is a phenomenon future generations, and many current “fans”, will look back upon with a mixture of embarrassment and bewilderment. Or you might like the fantasy novels of George RR Martin elves, ’pon which it be based, my lords and ladies, and enjoy being mesmerised by gargoyle peasantry, elves, sexy wicked queens, tame dragons and all that.
One of the stars of this inexplicable hit, Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen ( I mean, I ask you), says that this eighth series is “bigger than anything we’ve ever done – 10 times bigger. It’s like everything is on steroids.” So it is a very very big load of cobblers indeed; 10 times bigger.
Having been held down and force-fed The Hobbit and the adventures of Bilbo bloody Baggins at school, I have fortunately been given a lifelong inoculation against the genre. You can your own minds up though. Obviously.
Moominvalley is much more like it. A community of talking Finnish hippo-style cartoon creatures living in a 3D animated world – much more believable than Game of Thrones, I think you’ll find. Plus this fresh adaptation of Tove Jansson’s classic works features the voices of Matt Berry (Moominpapa), Susie Brann (Hemulen), Jennifer Saunders (Mymble), Rosamund Pike (Moominmamma), Warwick Davis (Sniff), Richard Ayoade (The Ghost), Kate Winslet (Mrs Fillyjonk), Will Self (the Muskrat) and Matt Lucas (Teety-Woo). Welcome back, Snork Maiden.
Earth from Space is a remarkable achievement, melding close-up and conventional camera work with satellite imagery from hundreds of miles up to tell stories of life on earth. It is in fact frightening to see how, form a bird’s eye view and beyond, the ice cap is disintegrating, with a chunk about the size of southeast England forming one of the ice bergs very recorded – the satellite pictures used with time lapse to maximum effect.
In this week’s edition, the first of four, we’re also promised the spectacles afforded by the migration of elephants across the Okavango Delta in Botswana, penguin colonies in Antarctica, and Chinese students practising kung fu in synch on a parade ground about the size of Coventry. Not quite visible from space, though, that one.
You might just recall the slightly bizarre premise of the first series of Trust Me, two years ago, in which Jodie Whittaker played a nurse successfully impersonating a surgeon, which probably fell slightly the wrong side of plausibility, even though it also featured a lying crook of a journalist, just to give it some authenticity.
The second series only carries the title forward. This time its Ashley Jensen in the nurse’s uniform, probably legitimately. The question this time is, can she be the angle of death stalking the corridors of a Glasgow hospital, and, in particular looking to do a paraplegic and uncommunicative victim, played by Alfred Enoch, fatal harm? John Hannah also stars in a promising four-part thriller.
Please do make a date with First Dates. This series, featuring real-life would-be couples chatting, eating and, sometimes, falling in love over a nice meal and a glass of wine, seems such a simple, charming affair that it must take an awful lot of effort in the edit suite to make it look quite so guileless. This week we meet a beautician with a thing for female footballers, a rock musician out with a pocket rocket and someone lucky enough to have landed a table with a volunteer at an owl sanctuary. For a second date I bet he knows a cracking owl sanctuary.
Famalam (BBC3/BBC iPlayer); Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday 9pm); Moominvalley (Sky 1, Good Friday 5.30pm); Earth from Space (BBC1, Wednesday 9pm); Trust Me (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm); First Dates (Channel 4, Tuesday 10pm)
